Stewart Brand
speaker
734 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Jan 2026
last heard 24 Apr
Stewart Brand’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Apr 2026 with 1.
Appearances
uh and their energy efficiency is enormously high uh whereas a gasoline internal combustion engine as they say uh it spends most of its energy just getting out of its own way so uh that
That efficiency of energy and efficiency of maintenance is part of the story of progress.
You see that also in the ways that we have dealt with corrosion, with rust over the years.
There's a whole story of that in my book about how
From way back, like 4,000 years ago, people have been trying to make a kind of a steel that doesn't rust.
The problem with steel is that, or iron, is that the...
When it oxidizes into rust, that's a bigger molecule than the straightforward iron or steel molecule.
And so it puffs up and then falls off and exposes more.
It's not protecting against future rust.
So that became a big quest, and finally stainless steel was discovered.
With enough chromium, you can make it so that there's an oxidized layer of chromium on there that does protect the steel.
You still have to be careful.
Yeah, and I think lots of things might as well be short-lived.
And this is the whole idea of kind of disposable containers versus something that you're going to keep going.
The cover of the book honors the idea of kintsugi, the Japanese art of basically repairing broken things.
pottery with a kind of a gold glue, and so it not only fixes it, but it makes it more beautiful, and you honor the mistake that broke it, and you honor the repair, and then you brag about it.
So kintsugi is...
is a way of kind of just honoring the fact that things do break.
But nobody actually wants things to break.
And so what is being done with scientific and engineering progress is make things that are lower and lower maintenance.
Showing 521–540 of 734 · page 27 of 37
← Previous
Next →